The UN said the numbers of AIDS deaths and infections have declined in the last decade, but new infections worldwide have far outpaced efforts to provide anti-retroviral treatment to patients.
UN health programs provided anti-retroviral treatment to an additional 1 million people last year, but in the same year a total of 2.5 million people became infected with the AIDS virus.
“Unless the international community takes immediate action to follow through on the pledges made to implement an exceptional response to HIV, the epidemic’s humanitarian and economic toll will continue to increase,” the UN said in an update report to be presented to the two-day UN General Assembly’s HIV/AIDS conference beginning tomorrow.
It calls for “strong, sustained political commitment and leadership” to fight the epidemic, which has killed more than 25 million people since AIDS was first isolated in the middle of the 1980s.
“True leadership is reflected in action, not words,” the report says.
The assembly session is called to review progress made since 2001, when the UN launched worldwide programs to try to halt the spread of the epidemic by 2015.
At the midpoint of the ambitious program, the UN said that progress has become “evident” in many regions but remains uneven across and even within countries.
Fighting HIV/AIDS is part of the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the assembly in 2000 to address the world’s health, education, infant and maternal mortality and gender equality.
The report says that an estimated 32.2 million people worldwide were living with HIV in December. But the annual rate of new infections appeared to have declined over the last decade, with 2.5 million new infections last year, down from 3.2 million infections in 1998.
Women represent half of all HIV infections among adults, with 61 per cent of them in Africa’s sub-Saharan countries.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion